Road and Beyond: The Expanded Book-Club Edition of The Road to You

by Brant, Marilyn

  He squinted at me. “Hmm. You don’t want to be the center of attention, do you?”

  “No. Not usually. I’m an observer. I watch people. I know you know that.” I grinned at him, feeling the strange high of being so direct and honest with someone I was attracted to. Someone I desperately wanted to touch again with my fingertips, my palms, my arms and more. I inched closer to him. “I want to get out of this bucolic little place and see the world. Anonymously.”

  “Boo—what?” He stepped back to restore the distance between us and chuckled at my phrase. “Anyone ever tell you that you use too many big words?”

  I didn’t answer. Alcohol made some people giddily drunk. For me, it had the primary effect of making me more introspective. And, apparently, it strengthened my vocabulary.

  He exhaled, pecked a light kiss on my forehead and said, “Don’t rush things, Aurora. It’ll all happen for you.” Then, with those patronizing words still hanging in the air between us, he raised his palm in a parting wave and marched himself out of the hotel suite.

  I slumped against the kitchenette wall and grimaced, hoping he’d come back—wishing and almost praying for it—but knowing he wouldn’t.

  A half hour later, when Betsy stumbled in the room without the St. Cloud townie (he was snoring in the hallway), she said to me, “I’m tired. Can we go?”

  So she and I left. I thought it would be years before I saw Donovan McCafferty again...but it turned out to be much sooner than that. Just a little over a month later, he came home briefly for a week, during the missing persons investigation. And everything that had happened between us before that just seemed frivolous, embarrassing and improbable.

  I never would have predicted that we’d ever be in a motel room together again. That I’d be studying him like this as he sat on the bed with me, acting like he owned it, while he faked the appearance of being calm.

  What a lie. He couldn’t have been more wound up if he’d been a yo-yo.

  During the TV commercials, I tried to get him to strategize with me about the next day. Discuss what we’d do when we went to the corner store and found this Ronny guy. What we’d ask him.

  “I don’t want to talk right now, Aurora. I don’t want to overanalyze anything. And I sure as hell don’t want to plan what I’m gonna say twelve hours from now,” he snapped. “I just want to relax, okay?” He underscored this statement by yawning loudly, stretching out even more and gluing his eyes to Jim Rockford.

  Intellectually, I understood this was his way of resisting change, and I was starting to get a sense of what, exactly, fueled his anger.

  I remembered beyond the investigation, even beyond the “funeral” services our parents had held for our brothers. In the early days, Donovan had been hopeful, so sure we’d find the answers quickly, much like a couple of lead actors in a detective show.

  But he didn’t deal well with ambiguity. Didn’t like all the “I don’t knows” that lingered. And, so, he’d made a choice. A choice to slam the door on all hope. To reopen that door could be potentially very painful and undoubtedly very frightening.

  Donovan, I realized, wasn’t a man who’d easily admit to fear. Anger, of course, was an acceptable emotion.

  Sometime before the end of the show, he fell asleep on top of the bed, fully clothed—the TV crime still unsolved and me still watching him, thinking about how to get him to see the world a little more like I did. Get him to perceive a few more impulses, so he’d understand the complexity.

  Not only of the situation, but of me.

  1:26 p.m.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Pasadena, California ~ Friday, August 15, 2014

  Jay finally called me back.

  “Hey, Mom, what’s up?”

  The words came out of me like the spurt of a ruptured vessel. “Charlie didn’t show up for work today and no one seems to know where he is. Did he tell you anything? Say he had plans for a long weekend?”

  I heard my son’s bafflement in his silence, even before he said, “No. Nada. But I’m sure he’s fine, Mom. Probably just some mix up.”

  Yeah. That’s what we all thought, too, when Gideon and Jeremy first disappeared.

  “The secretary at his work told me that even Cassandra didn’t know,” I added.

  I’d been in touch with Gloria again since our earlier conversation. Charlie still hadn’t appeared at work or called in. “We had to reschedule the plastics people,” the woman dared to say with an irritated sniff.

  Screw the plastics people. Where the hell is my son?

  I hadn’t trusted myself to reply to her aloud.

  Jay cleared his throat. “Well, uh, no. Cassandra probably wouldn’t know.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “They broke up, you know. Like—” He paused. “About three weeks ago. A month, maybe.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, he didn’t tell you yet?” Jay laughed, in that nervous way he did when he was embarrassed. “Sorry. I thought you knew. Didn’t seem like a big deal to him. I think he needed space...or she did...or something. He was totally fine.”

  Clearly, this was not true. There were signals I’d missed. There must have been. No one broke up with someone he’d dated exclusively for over a year and remained “totally fine.” Unless, maybe, it hadn’t been so exclusive after all. Hmm.

  And me...who’d always prided myself on my intuition. Who’d rarely missed a mood change in my boys when they were toddlers or teens. Where had my perceptions gone this time? What had I failed to notice? I felt like a fraud.

  Granted, I hadn’t seen Charlie and Cassandra together in person since—when? Mother’s Day? I’d talked with him on the phone two-dozen times since then, at least. He’d met us for a family dinner on my birthday and stopped by on a number of other occasions during the summer. Just not, admittedly, with his now ex-girlfriend.

  “Jay, just promise you’ll call me if you think of anything else,” I said. “Or if you hear from him, okay? I’ll be up late.”

  “Sure, Mom,” he promised easily (too easily) before hanging up and leaving me to my fears—a purgatory of what-ifs.

  “The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.”

  ~John Ruskin

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Crescent Cove, Wisconsin ~ Saturday, June 10, 1978

  Donovan and I waited until a respectable ten a.m. before checking out of the motel and driving back to Crescent Cove.

  During a lazy weekend morning, the town looked different than it had the night before. Not that the prior evening had been “bustling” by any stretch of the imagination, but there had, in fact, been people visible on Friday. Awake. Drinking. Wandering about the town and such. On a Saturday, midmorning, it was like the sun shining on a corpse—brightly lit but dead.

  As we pushed our way through the corner store’s torn-screen front door, I couldn’t help but make comparisons again between Dale’s Grocery Mart and this place. This store was even smaller and mustier than where I worked, but that depressing, end-of-the-line feeling I got just crossing the threshold was identical.

  Only two people were in the store—the clerk, who was a twenty-something, very fair-haired male, and an old lady, who wore a thin print dress and was coughing up half a lung into her handkerchief.

  I didn’t have a problem with the old-lady shopper. I’d served an endless stream of customers like that. Always on a strict budget. Always a little sick with something. Almost always alone.

  The clerk, however, gave me a distinctly negative vibe, especially when the very first time he glanced at us he shot us a look so irritated you would’ve thought we’d interrupted him in the middle of his lunch break.

  Donovan drew in a surprised breath next to me when he spotted the clerk, and I knew why. We’d both been expecting Ronny Lee Wolf to be a Native American.

  But this dude looked more Scandinavian than anything else, with eyebrows so blond they disappeared into his pale skin, and none of the traditional Chippewa facial features
. Forget the “Wolf” surname, if he had even a drop of Native American blood I would have been surprised. Apparently, he was Ben Rainwater’s “cousin,” although maybe that term was used loosely. We knew for a fact that Ben had lived on the tribal lands when he was alive.

  Unless the clerk wasn’t Ben’s cousin. Unless he was somebody else entirely—someone filling in for the cousin.

  I couldn’t shake the hope that this cold, creepy guy might not be Ronny. That the real Ronny would be someone else. Someone more approachable. Someone who wouldn’t make my senses tingle with the absolute certainty that we couldn’t trust him.

  “You two need anything?” the clerk asked, a hard edge to his voice.

  For a moment, Donovan looked as if he might stare the guy down, but then he seemed to remember his role and, instead, broke into a sloppy grin. “Just a couple of supplies, man. We’ll find ‘em.” He grabbed a loaf of bread. To help, I snatched a jar of peanut butter and held it up like a prop.

  The clerk grunted but continued to eye us suspiciously. Every tiny hair on my body rose when he looked in our direction.

  The old lady coughed some more in that unhealthy, croaking way. Hunched over her little plastic basket with just a few items in it, she said, “Ronny, are you out of tomato soup? I don’t see none here.”

  “Might be a few cans in the back, Ms. Ida,” the clerk—who was Ronny, oh, damn—called out to her, his voice softening a little when he said her name. “I’ll check for ya quick.”

  He disappeared for a minute, and Donovan, whose first thought actually mirrored mine for a change, murmured, “Shit. That’s him.”

  I nodded and sighed.

  Donovan sniffed the air and gazed down the aisles. “Something just smells funny about this place,” he whispered, almost inaudibly. “I think he’s selling more than Wonder Bread and Jif.”

  “Weed?” I mouthed.

  “Maybe…or maybe something stronger,” he mouthed back. “Acid. Angel dust. Cocaine. I don’t know.”

  Ronny returned and handed over one soup can to the older lady. “This is all we’ve got for now. I’ll get an order put in for more this week.”

  The Ida woman shuffled to the register, purchased her few items and left. Then, unfortunately, the clerk’s full attention was on us.

  Donovan swung into action, turning up his laidback charm-o-meter and finally putting to use some of the information he’d collected last night. He grinned again at the clerk. “So, man, you’re Ronny Lee Wolf, right?”

  “What’s it to you?” Ronny threaded his fingers through his fine blond hair, which was longish in the back and stringy, like the way some stoner in a rock band would wear it.

  “Just wanted to make sure I had the boss, you know, the big man.”

  How Donovan managed to make that line sound sincere was beyond me, but it seemed effective in buttering up Ronny, at least a little. The clerk shrugged. “Okay, yeah. So, what do you want?”

  Donovan sidled up to the register, put the bread and the jar of peanut butter on the counter and glanced (a bit too obviously, in my opinion) around the store, as if sweeping for eavesdroppers.

  “I didn’t wanna say anything while the little old lady was in here, but we just came into town last night to visit some friends, and they told us about you.” Donovan paused. Leaned forward. “Said you had, you know, extra provisions…” He let the thought trail off and smiled knowingly at the clerk.

  This was a big gamble on Donovan’s part. I tried to look relaxed and natural, but the edges of worry cut lines of anxiety into my gut. It was a dangerous game, playing a hunch like that. Not only implying that Ronny was some kind of dealer, but that we knew intimately anyone at all in Crescent Cove, a town not much larger than some extended families.

  My fears grew deeper when Ronny asked, “Which friends are those?”

  I studied the clerk’s face for tells. Caught the way his glance shifted for a split second toward the backroom. The way he flinched then forced his features into an approximation of a smile. The way his hands hovered just above the counter and trembled ever so slightly from the effort it took to keep from grabbing something—a weapon, maybe—from below the register.

  “Kim and Cindy at the bar,” Donovan said easily, pointing vaguely in the direction of the place we were at last night. “And we got to talking to Mike, too. You know, the bartender?” He fiddled with a stick of beef jerky on the counter. “They said you could, uh…help us out.”

  I forced myself not to hold my breath. It would take Ronny only one conversation with any of the people Donovan had just name-dropped to unveil the truth. Donovan had just put a ticking clock on our stay in Crescent Cove.

  Ronny’s eyes narrowed. “Where’re you from?”

  “St. Paul,” Donovan said, his now-standard response.

  A smirk graced the clerk’s face that gave me the most uneasy feeling imaginable. “How much money you people got?” he asked.

  “How much stuff is in a bag?” Donovan shot back, still grinning languidly.

  “Little bag, ten bucks. Big bag, twenty. Cash only.”

  Donovan plucked a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and passed it to Ronny.

  The clerk licked his lips, scanned the doors and windows for peeping eyes, snatched the bill and pocketed it. “Hang on,” he said, as he walked into the backroom and emerged in under fifteen seconds with a largish, unmarked, brown-paper sack with the top rolled shut. “Careful with this. You don’t want to shake it too much. And keep it dry.”

  Donovan unrolled the top and peered inside. His expression betrayed nothing, but the stillness of his body told me he hadn’t gotten what he’d expected.

  “Thanks, man,” he said to Ronny in that same pseudo-relaxed voice. The two guys nodded to each other before Donovan nudged me out the door with an urgency that was surprising.

  “What’s in there?” I whispered when we were on the sidewalk, several yards away from the store and near enough to the Trans Am to make a quick escape. “That’s an awfully large bag for drugs.”

  “Get in the car,” he said grimly, “and I’ll show you.”

  When we were inside, he slowly opened the bag and let me look. It wasn’t drugs. No, it was fireworks. Unlabeled. Not uniform in size or shape. Without any typical commercial packaging. In other words, the illegal kind.

  “Oh,” I said. “Do you think that’s all he sells?”

  Donovan shook his head. “I wouldn’t put drugs or firearms past him, but this is bad enough. Possession of this kind of stash could land him in almost as much trouble.” He looked warily at the brown-paper sack. “Us, too, if we get caught holding this.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Yeah.” He set the bag gently on the backseat and put the car into gear. “I want to take a closer look at these. Somewhere private, though. And I want to check your brother’s journal again, too.”

  We drove down one of the long country roads, headed in the direction of the St. Croix Chippewa Tribal Lands.

  “We should poke around the reservation area,” I said. “And check out the site of this Bonner Mill, too.” The more we looked around, the more people I could talk to face to face, the more subtle information I’d be able to pick up.

  “First we go through everything in this bag. Then,” he said, “we’ll see.”

  After about a mile or so, he pulled the car into the driveway of an abandoned farmhouse, parked in the shade and began rifling through the contents of the sack—very gingerly.

  As he studied each of the fireworks, he sniffed them, looked at their wicks and their casings, tested their weight in his palms and gently set them down on the dashboard, until he’d lined most of them up like a ragtag band of soldiers.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said under his breath as he held up a pair of red-tube firecrackers, each one not even two inches long, but they had a stiff fuse sticking out of their middles and paper end caps covering their sides like little bonnets.

  To me, they looked kind of like thos
e fake bombs you might see on a kids’ cartoon. The ones poor Wile E. Coyote used to try to blow the Roadrunner up with—again and again.

  Donovan wasn’t laughing, though. “These are M-80s, Aurora. They might look harmless to you but, if they’re what I think they are, they’ve got about sixty times more flash powder in each tube than is legal in the U.S.A. And there are cherry bombs in here and…oh, shit.” He pulled something silvery out of the bag. “Original quarter sticks.”

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  My brother was the kind of kid who was always building models or experimenting with chemistry sets, taking apart old clocks or connecting electrical circuits—none of which I’d had any personal interest in growing up. I’d only played with sparklers on the Fourth of July and the occasional child-friendly Roman candle our dad had gotten for Gideon and me at the local drugstore.

  To my inexperienced eye, the cherry bombs didn’t look all that different from the smoke bombs I saw my brother and some of the neighbor boys fooling around with when we were kids, but Donovan was staring in horror at the silver tube in his hand. It was, maybe, four-inches long but he was looking at it like it was a lethal weapon.

  He let out a long, slow breath. “It means if we get caught with this, we’ll get one hell of a fine.”

  He shook his head, careful not to jostle the firecracker too much as he scrutinized it from every angle, looking for markings, touching the green fuse with just the tip of his index finger and wincing as if it hurt him to have to hold it.

  “Legal quarter sticks can only have fifty milligrams of flash powder,” Donovan explained. “Too many people got injured using originals like these, so they outlawed them. But this particular firecracker was either made a dozen years ago, before the ban, or it was made recently and in secret. From the size and heft to it, it most likely has ten grams of flash powder. That’s two hundred times more than the legal limit. Enough to blow off a hand and, possibly, even kill a man.”